Nice ride! and Love Quinn’s shirt. and Danny boy’s tan line on his face along with the awesome “eyebrows”. Now that Ellie has picked her car, I wonder what Quinn will go for. Probably a small, 2 door coupe…in purple, of course.

They truly are, except for the mechanic element. I’ve taken my ride to three different mechanics when the work gets to be more than I can do. They work at a snails pace. I’ve never gotten it back in under six weeks. Other than that, makes your daily commute feel like an adventure, and your adventure feel like an epic journey.

Every time I consider a motorcycle, I also consider the frequency of commutes that I’m not tired and a little out of it on at least one half of the trip. Then I stop considering motorcycles for a while (until I start all over again with that cycle).

I wouldn’t suggest a motorcycle for commuting. Granted, my commute is an hour in each direction, and its mostly highway, but still… no.
Get a toy first and on really nice days when you are well rested, ride it in.
My bike is quick. I’ve had the speed protect me from accidents on the highway. A guy in an Audi drifted from his lane into mine. Instead of getting hit I just opened the throttle in 6th and half a second later I was past him and nearing 110 mph.
My bike is agile. Another time, I watched a girl in a red Pontiac Sunfire get cut off by a quad cab Ram 1500 as it entered the highway. Well, she was going to curse that guy out no matter what. She shifted into the fast lane right in front of me, and accelerated to flip the truck’s driver off, and ran right into the back of a car that had stopped for traffic. This happened right in front of me, and I was slowing but admittedly had missed the traffic stopping because of the highway dramazors. I dipped left onto the shoulder and rode past three cars at about 45 mph, inches away from them as their air bags deployed from the chain reaction Sunfire chick had started. I should mention this was on a bridge. Three inches to the left of my knee was concrete bridge, five inches to my right was thirty feet of car accident.
Good times. I got back in the fast lane and got the hell out of there, only to almost be decked a few miles later by a wheel bouncing down the highway. Apparently it fell off a big truck and was bouncing 15 feet in the air between cars.
If I had been in a car, I would have participated in the accident on the bridge. But there’s nothing like three thousand pounds of steel and plastic to protect you from the world.

I commute with my bike all the time (sometimes in excess of an hour one way.

I see it as a positive in many ways not least of which are:

1. I get mad savings on my gas when I ride.
2. It makes driving to and from work much more bearable.
3. The looks of envy from my co-workers.

But yea, if you’re wiped out don’t ride. It requires full attention and a much higher level of awareness than a car because as Tesla pointed out, you don’t have a steel cage with engineered crumple zones surrounding you.

As Chris can attest by virtue of meeting someone who did it wrong, you can’t really let your mind drift behind the wheel of a car either. Basically anything going faster than about ten to fifteen miles per hour means that your attention should be on the road the whole time.

That being said, a motorbike is actually not bad for commuting. At least for distances that take no more than up to an hour each way. Anything longer is pretty much a case for public transport anyway, if you ask me.

I’m going to say that the fact that two wheeled conveyances require more active balance and easily can and do end up sideways with one of your legs under them along with smaller objects being easier for other cars to fail to notice as they do something puts motorcycles as definitely requiring substantially more attention than a car. Not disagreeing that paying attention is necessary in a car, more that lapses are decidedly more likely to lead to harsher punishment on a motorcycle than a car.

All this is exactly why I never land on the side of getting a motorcycle. Commute is the vast majority of my driving, so not worth it if not using for commute. Not being all that awake on my commute in is a >50% of the time thing for me, and it’s not odd for being fully awake on commute in being caused by waking up too early and being too awake to get back to sleep, leading to groggy commute home.

Balance is actually not much of an issue unless at very slow speed. That is walking to maybe jogging speed. Everything over is very stable and the right amount of leaning into turns comes pretty naturally after a while.

And visibility from a bike is better than from a car plus you’re better aware of your (smaller) size. Those are points that speak for more attention needed when driving a car, actually.

You are right however that other drivers will more likely fail to notice a motorcycle than a car and that consequences when something goes wrong are generally worse on a bike. So while you don’t really need to pay more attention on a bike, motorcyclists will usually do so by way of thinking more about what the drivers around them are doing then car drivers do.

They still are small, cheap vehicles. Until you make them large, tube chassis based rock buggies. Then you need to buy another one for a DD. Until you make it a large, tube chassis based mud bogger. Then you need to buy another one for a DD…

There’s plenty of arguments about the origin of the name, but the general consensus is that “Jeep” is a corruption/pronunciation of “GP” or “General Purpose”, which was the classification for the first small 4×4 vehicles bought by the US Army before WW2. There’s also the theory that the Ford GPW abbreviation actually meant G for government use, P to designate its 80-inch (2,000 mm) wheelbase and W to indicate its Willys-Overland designed engine. There was also a comic strip character called “Eugene the Jeep” which had appeared before the automobile (1936), who was magical sidekick to Popeye the Sailor in the newspapers.

I also own a small but unfathomably reliable and fun Honda CA125 Rebel. Low gas consumption, insurance and tax cost to boot. As long as there’s no snow and ice, I drive it even in winter. Reasonable gear and even temperatures at or just below zero celsius are not a problem, at least on short distances (up to twenty kilometres or so). With (available) actual low temperature gear, you could go even lower or further.
Rain can be a problem because of manhole covers and road markings becoming slippery traps. Hence why I hate to ride unknown roads in the dark when it’s wet. Known roads though (where I know all the markings and manholes by heart) are no big problem in the rain. Only thing trouble is keeping visibility through your visor up.

When I first saw this page it seemed surreal, almost like it was a dream. It pleases me to see some honor at last. Mr. McVie has garnered my favor despite initial impressions. May the works of his hands be blessed and yield many fold greater than his troubles.

Fer Sure LE is channeling Cher here, and as a member of a large horde, not beyond throwing business to a family member, so I’m guessing the Kensington Motors salesman is from Williams side of the family… and did we ever get his surname?

I’m glad to see this exchange being civil. Danny’s craft paper eyebrows are a brilliant touch and Ellie and Quinn look amazing in this strip.
On a tangentially related note, I remember Ellie saying that she always thought Quinn was the more attractive of the two of them. The more you refine Quinn’s look, the more I see why.

I always thought Quinn’s facial features looked better than Ellie’s. Quinn’s face just is frequently drawn showing some form of negative emotion, so knee-jerk reaction will be to consider the more positive-looking one more attractive.

It can be handy to have a kid to tell to do some form of driving-requiring task. Once Juniper was disowned and considering the abundant well of evil and stupidity that is Cinn, I’d imagine Herb & Rosemary wanted Ellie to get her license. Especially when they’re saying that neither of them generally get home until 18:00 (which I seem to recall in the conversations regarding Kat).

I would like to think you are right, but she’s competing with Ellie. Ellie will be able to go anywhere, but Quinn would be able to get there a lot faster.
Basically, if there’s a purple Mustang GT parked next to a brand new Civic and they both cost the same amount … Quinn will buy the purple car.

I’m thinking about it more from a personality/affordability angle. Quinn might want something that literally can only seat one other person, tops, so she can get out of giving people rides. She also seems to be about minimizing attention, so something that combines small and gas-efficient might appeal to her. Plus, I don’t know how expensive Ellie’s jeep will be, so there may have been a negotiation that Ellie occasionally give Quinn rides when they’re going to the same place to make up for the disparate vehicle prices.

When I think about what Quinn might look for in a car, the words “reliable” and “affordable” are actually rather high up on the list. The affordable part here mostly meaning low gas consumption and insurance cost. And low cost on any necessary replacement parts.
Something like or similar to, I don’t know… A Volkswagen Golf for example.

Last I checked Consumer reports a couple of years ago, VWs apparently average 2 breakdowns/year in the US. I’ve been told by some people that it’s that half the VWs in the US are manufactured in Mexico and they get 3-4 breakdowns/year and the European ones are more reliable. So that may be skewing your view.

Rate I saw for Toyotas & Hondas in the same was averaging half a breakdown/year. Ford & GM were in the 1 range.

Volkswagen are more on the reliable end of the spectrum around here (Europe). Though it’s true, the Japanese tend to have them beat on that. I didn’t necessarily mean she would have to get a Volkswagen with my comment though. I was rather referring to the general class the particular car mentioned pretty much is the most known example of. And pretty much a classic whose fan culture in Europe rivals or even beats that of the Mustang or Jeep in the US.

Which car? Ellie’s Jeep is Ellie’s Jeep. I can’t tell if it’s a TJ or a JK, but it is looking rather TJish. TJs ran from 1997 to 2006 when they were replaced by the JK.
We haven’t yet seen what tickles Quinn’s fancy. I was simply commenting that Ford tossed out purple Mustangs back in the day, and say what you want, the 281 was actually a good engine.
Her unreliable car of indeterminate pedigree may be used as a trade in to purchase a more expensive car. Either way, Mustang GTs from 1996 aren’t going to be more than 10K unless we are talking about a Saleen.
Which would be unbelievably awesome.

I was also disappointed when I used “mudding” as a conversational ice-breaker with college girl Jeep owners and either got blank looks or expressions of horror in return. It’s what Wranglers were made for…

The first car that was ever mine was a Jeep Wrangler. It had no A/C and a heater that hardly worked. The transmission went out and cost me a fortune to fix and maintain. The windshield leaked destroying two radios. And I absolutely loved it. If and when I get enough money I’m getting another. I loved taking the top and doors off. I loved going off-road with my friends and getting it covered in mud. I loved how easy and simple it was to work on. I loved that everyone who drove a Wrangler would wave at each other. They really are car crack.

The only reason there was duct tape on my window was because someone cut open the top to try to steal it (they failed). On the other hand, Wranglers are very hard to steal and the cop said he hadn’t heard of any being reported stolen.

Part of the audiences problem here, is that the possible relationship between Ellie and the car dealer is left unknown, as her question about the vehicle’s doors has been rendered incomplete by the salesman’s presence. While Ellie has not gone all, “O.M.G. I didn’t know YOU worked here” or anything like that, she still trailed off with her question, leaving it uncompleted.